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Visa Delays Put Iraqis Who Aided U.S. in Fear

Abu Hassan, with his wife, Umm, and their three children, are waiting for approval to leave Iraq for the United States.Credit
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

BAGHDAD — Terrorism fears in the United States are all but halting visas for Iraqis, even those who risked their lives aiding the American war effort, making them especially vulnerable ahead of the planned American military withdrawal.

The Obama administration has required new background checks for visa applicants, reacting to a case in Kentucky in which two Iraqi immigrants were arrested on suspicion of ties to an insurgent group, according to American officials in Baghdad.

Advocates say that the administration is ignoring a directive from Congress to draft a contingency plan to expedite visas should those Iraqis who worked for the United States government, especially interpreters for the military, come under increased threat after American forces are drawn down at the end of the year.

“This is not a priority right now for anyone in the government,” said Becca Heller, who runs the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York. “Not enough people in the Obama administration care about this topic.”

Through the first nine months of the current fiscal year, fewer than 7,000 Iraqis have been admitted to the United States. In March, just seven were admitted on a so-called special immigrant visa — a class established by Congress to quickly move Iraqis in danger for having helped the American government — and in April, just nine. In some months last year more than 200 arrived on such visas.

The logjam has put numerous Iraqis, like the Aeisa family, in a potentially dangerous bind.

Their story is a common one: a brother was kidnapped and tortured, and the children were bullied in the schoolyard, accused of being spies even by the principal.

Last month they received the phone call they thought would never come. Their visa applications were approved, and they would soon be on their way to Arizona.

The father quit his job at Zain, a cellphone company, the children left school, the television, furniture and air-conditioner were sold, and the remaining belongings were packed up. The family of five took up temporary residence in a friend’s storage room.

Photo

Ghaith Baban, 34, who works for the United States in Iraq, checked his car for bombs last week after he received death threats.Credit
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

The week before the flight, another phone call came, this time with bad news. The departure was delayed indefinitely and without explanation.

“It hurts me even more than all the threats we received,” said the father, who asked to be identified only as Abu Hassan for security reasons. “We were expecting, ‘This is it.’ ” The mother, who asked to be identified as Umm Hassan, whose brother and father worked for the American military and now live in Arizona, said only, “I feel sick.”

Kirk Johnson, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in Falluja in 2005 and then founded The List Project, a nonprofit group that aids Iraqis who worked for American-affiliated organizations, said, “Basically, I think where there’s a way to stall the program, there’s a will to do it.”

Congress required the Pentagon and the Departments of State and Homeland Security to draft a plan to expedite visas for the most pressing cases, should insurgents threaten those left behind after the military leaves, and set a deadline of May that was not met.

Meanwhile, neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has met the targets set by Congress several years for issuing special immigrant visas.

The numbers are stark: beginning in 2008, Congress expanded the special immigrant visa program to allot 25,000 slots over five years. After nearly four years, the government has issued about 7,000.

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Mr. Johnson said the impetus for the legislation was to avoid a huge refugee crisis like the one after the pullout from Vietnam. In 2006, after British forces pulled out of Basra, the southern Iraqi port city, interpreters were rounded up and killed.

In an interview in Baghdad in May, Eric P. Schwartz, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, said the administration would take care of the Iraqis who had assisted the American forces. “We feel that we are prepared to deal with any variety of contingencies,” he said.

Many thousands of Iraqis worked as interpreters for the American military, translating not just words but the cultural folkways of a land most soldiers knew nothing about.

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Rana next to the family's belongings, packed for their move to the United States. Credit
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan, the top military spokesman here, said of his interpreters over the years: “We were in a lot of hairy stuff together. So you get a bond with these guys that’s incredible.”

Like many officers, he helped an interpreter from a previous tour navigate the bureaucracy of resettlement. Asked about the process, he said: “He got there. It took a long time.”

Another former interpreter of his recently saw him on Iraqi television and contacted him. “He got captured by Al Qaeda and was held for about seven months and was tortured,” General Buchanan said.

The American government never kept track of how many Iraqis it employed. “50,000? 100,000? 120,000? Who knows?” Mr. Johnson said .

The government also never accounted for how many Iraqi employees were killed or wounded. But it is clear hundreds have died, and many more have been wounded. A database kept by Titan, a contractor that provided interpreters, was leaked and subsequently published in ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism. For the period between 2003 and 2008, the document showed nearly 300 deaths of interpreters hired by Titan.

Now, with the military leaving, many of those who survived, or still work for the Americans, feel abandoned and betrayed by a government they risked their lives for, by serving on the front lines for a cause they believed in.

Iraq is not as violent as it once was, but Iraqis are still threatened for their work with the Americans. Ghaith Baban, 34, works for U.S.A.I.D. and spent May in hiding after he found a note in his garage that cited the Koran and threatened his life for “collaborating with the U.S.” He first applied for resettlement in early 2009 and is still waiting.

When the military leaves, he said, “it’s going to be the worst time for those people who worked for the Americans.”

Meanwhile, the Aeisa family waits for its promised flight to Arizona. The family never initially intended to leave. When relatives who worked for the American military left for the United States, the Aeisa family thought the threats would end. They didn’t. The family’s pit bull, Spider, was killed. A note was left: “Leave, traitors. You are spies for the Americans.” The family moved several times.

“We would have wanted to stay,” said Umm Hassan, the mother. “We had a farm, we had a normal family. All of our dreams were destroyed.”

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Visa Delays Put Iraqis Who Aided U.S. in Fear. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe